PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

The Wall St. Journal reports today on a number of new search technologies that promise to customize your search activity based on previous activity. If, for example, you have searched on Burgundy the place more often than Burgundy the wine, Google would return search results more travel-focused than oenophile-focused. Search personalization will soon extend to the ads you see as well. Sites to check out in this vein include collarity.com, which offers its own ‘relevance engine’ with a setting slider bar (purportedly, since it doesn’t appear on my browser) as well as third-party tools for sale, and Prefound.com, a profile-based search site that looked promising (but sent me an antispam failure message that will surely have our IT guy’s dander up). (more…)

Dmitri Siegel has a nice article on Adobe.com about designing for high stakes decisions. It’s worth the read because he outlines the complexity of the decision making process and the conflict between the wonderful opportunity to be able to make a choice and the task of making the right choice. Designing a user experience that helps users make confident choices is a deceptively difficult task that challenges companies to resolve notions of branding and selling.

By now all of us have seen the Geico cavemen, characters in a Martin Agency campaign launched in 2004 and originally intended to stop right there, with three spots. According to a Rob Walker piece in today’s Times Magazine, the idea was to present humor as a way to alleviate the spectacular lack of interest in car insurance: not unlike the way that gazing at the area just to the left or right of a star in a telescope seems to provide more visual payoff than staring at it directly. Now, three years later, the cavemen are on their way to a possible sitcom. This is either a surefire way to kill off any popularity the cavemen have generated, or more likely, another instance of the crossing of media, entertainment and content that characterize early 21st century advertising and branding. What interested me most about the phenomenon, though, was what spurred the client and agency to create more spots: blogging.
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Recently two clients, both leaders in their industries, have started to ask very basic questions about social media, and asked PJA to help answer those questions.

That’s not so surprising, given the follow-on ramp-up nature of many BtoB companies. From a marketing perspective, crossing the chasm takes longer in a consideration-intensive purchasing and business environment. Add to that the one- to two-year gap in marketing technology innovation among BtoB companies, especially those in regulated healthcare spaces, and you’ve got the situation today: a lot of BtoB companies still wondering where to make the best investments in social media.

In general, here are the top 5 questions we are hearing: (more…)